Who Is Really Hurt by Sequestration Defense Cuts?

When it became clear that sequestration meant most of the military branches would have to suspend tuition assistance—a program that allows active-duty service members to work toward degrees or enroll in vocational-training courses—there was a squawk of protest in Congress. A couple of Senators introduced an amendment to the Continuing Resolution—the budget bill to keep the government running—that would keep most of the funding in place, at least through the end of the fiscal year. Kay Hagan, of North Carolina, one of the co-sponsors, wrote that while the Pentagon clearly had “difficult budgetary decisions,” tuition assistance “gives our best and brightest the opportunity to continue developing their skills while on active duty, which will ultimately lead to smoother transitions to civilian life.”

That amendment, co-sponsored by James Inhofe, was dropped from the budget bill in the Senate Monday, only to be restored to the legislation, after a flurry of protest, in another vote on Wednesday. (It now has to pass the House; funding will still be cut by eight per cent, in line with the larger sequester.) By then, the Army, Air Force, and Marines had announced that they were cutting off the students in their ranks. Grants that had been processed before March 12th are still in place, but, until the legislation goes through, no new applications are being taken. Stars and Stripes reported that, at Ramstein Air Base’s education center, phones were ringing “with callers ranging from the distressed to those in disbelief.”

“It has been probably one of the craziest mornings of my career,” said Keith Davis, the chief of education and training at Ramstein, who fielded some of those phone calls. “It has been unbelievable.”

A White House petition quickly got more than the hundred thousand signatures needed for an official response (there hasn’t been one yet), as service members faced the immediate prospect of an education interrupted: debt but no degree. (It’s always harder to go back to school than to stay in it.) Meanwhile, each of the services was looking for ways to keep its members in class—for example, by cannibalizing G.I. Bill benefits that might have gone to their families.

The fight over tuition assistance was more visible than most, but it isn’t the only one. Sequestration requires some forty-one billion dollars in defense cuts this fiscal year. There are exemptions, for example, for military pay. And there are less noble work-arounds, too; as Rajiv Chandrasekaran wrote in the Washington Post last week, the F-35 program, whose cost has increased seventy per cent since it was first conceived and is now almost four hundred billion dollars, “will face only a glancing blow from the sequester,” even though it is the biggest single item in the military budget, in part because of contracts that have already gone through.

At the same time, as representatives of the various service branches testified before the House Armed Services Committee last week, they have been left to look for cuts in programs like on-base child care. Lieutenant General Darrell Jones, of the Air Force, testified that “military spouses comprise an estimated twenty-five per cent of our Child and Youth Program workforce,” and so furloughs, in addition to meaning that the hours of day-care centers may be cut or children put on waiting lists, “will create a direct financial hardship to some of our military families.” The Army’s Lieutenant General Howard Bromberg testified that some of the potentially vulnerable programs were “family intervention programs such as New Parent Support Home Visitation and other Family Advocacy programs that prevent domestic violence.” And the week of the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War, there will be cuts to scholarships for the children of the troops who died serving there, as well as in Afghanistan.

There are exemptions for health care for active-duty members and “wounded warriors,” but the whole system is likely to slow down as the people who process claims and retirements are furloughed—this at a time when there are six hundred thousand veterans with backlogged disability claims. The average waiting time for benefits claims is two hundred and seventy-three days.

Is there some gamesmanship in the Pentagon’s plans? Could it be smarter about allocating cuts? Probably, but the money has to come from somewhere, and the odds favor it coming from programs and affecting interests that don’t have strong lobbyists. Most of us might not notice it, if we’re not soldiers with marriages falling apart or trying to sign up for a class. The illusion of sequestration harmlessness, brought about by delays in furloughs, is going to end. There is no question that there are very large cuts that could be made to the Defense budget. (Not fighting wars saves money, too.) Sequestration avoids and distracts from them.

The sequester, of course, was never supposed to happen—applying mindless cuts to both domestic and military spending was supposed to be enough to make both sides act. But the Democrats, in particular, may have miscalculated, perhaps in thrall to a cartoon image of Republicans who, upon getting last-minute calls from desperate defense contractors, would run to the floor of Congress to pass some sensible legislation. That image relies, though, on a misunderstanding of both the G.O.P. today and of the Defense budget. As Ryan Lizza recently wrote, there are more Tea Party–influenced Republicans who are comfortable with military cuts. There are also contractors whose calls may be about how to maneuver around sequestration, not stop it. Beyond that, there is a good part of the Defense budget that looks, and functions, like the sort of social spending that reflects more liberal than conservative interests. One way or the other, while Congressmen seem to be learning to love the budgetary laziness sequestration allows them, there are soldiers who won’t get help going to class.

An Introduction to Veterans Studies class at Eastern Kentucky University, taught by Travis Martin, who is an Iraq veteran. Photograph by Jabin Botsford/The New York Times/Redux.

Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.